Using Math and Baseball to Defend Electoral College

Nov. 10 -- Four days after the presidential elections, much remains uncertain. But one possibility is clear: The next president may not have earned the most votes of the American people.

That prospect has many questioning the fairness of the Electoral College. In fact, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, now New York’s senator-elect, announced today that to “respect the will of the people” we should “do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.”

But some, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Alan Natapoff, believe such a move would be highly unscientific.

“Getting rid of this system would be like cutting out an organ of the human body without knowing what it does,” says Natapoff, who has been crunching numbers since 1960 to demonstrate how the Electoral College empowers voters.

Old System, Many Challenges

The Electoral College, set up by the Founding Fathers, grants each state a number of electoral votes, based on the number of people each state elects to the House of Representatives. In all but two states, Maine and Nebraska, the majority vote of the state decides which candidate should get all its electoral votes. Whichever candidate wins the majority of the nation’s 538 electoral votes wins the election — regardless of who wins the popular vote count.

Mrs. Clinton is hardly the first to call for abandoning the system. The League of Women Voters, the American Bar Association and a number of senators have been pushing to get rid of the college for many years. In fact, over the past 200 years, more than 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College.

So far, the Electoral College has survived all of those challenges, although some believe this election could be the final straw.

“There’s always a wave of reform sentiment following a contested election,” says Neal Pierce, co-author of The People’s President, a book about the Electoral College. “I think the minimal result of this is to demand a fair game in the future and you cannot have a fair game with this system.”